The House of Rolls-Royce is delighted to announce that media artist Refik Anadol will create a new work for the Rolls-Royce Art Programme. The Turkish-born, LA-based artist will create a unique work of digital art using data sets relating to the colour of every Rolls-Royce motor car created at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, West Sussex, over the last ten years. The artwork will be previewed at the House of Rolls-Royce’s major philanthropic event, ‘Dine on the Line’, on 21 September 2019, to be held at the marque’s Global Centre of Luxury Manufacturing Excellence. The new commission will then be presented on permanent display at Rolls-Royce’s global headquarters, with an edition of the piece travelling to international showrooms from early 2020.
The new artwork, entitled Art of Perfection: Data Painting, will consist of an LED ‘canvas’, conveying a unique data painting that uses a series of data sets taken from Rolls-Royce Motor Cars’ Surface Finish Centre. The data relates to the colour reference of each car produced over the past decade, combined with the data generated by the programmed robotic movement required to perfectly apply the surface finish to each car. The custom visuals created for this work have been precisely designed to complement the ‘canvas’ and surrounding space.
Torsten Müller-Ötvös, Chief Executive Officer, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, commented: “Since its foundation over 115 years ago, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has acted as a great source of inspiration for artists. It gives me great pleasure to see this continue to this day. Refik Anadol was recently an honoured guest at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, West Sussex, where he was drawn to the complex data sets generated by the Surface Finish Centre, as well as the thousands of unique colours chosen by our clients. We look forward to previewing his digital artwork which incorporates these data sets and colours, fittingly at the Home of Rolls-Royce.”
Artist Refik Anadol commented, “As an artist who utilizes data as pigment, I’m very excited that Rolls-Royce is sharing their complex computational painting data with me, to use as the raw material for this artwork. This project will be very collaborative as there is a direct correlation between Rolls-Royce’s process and mine, in that we harness machines and machine intelligence to help actualize our vision of beauty.”
Anadol’s body of work addresses the challenges and the possibilities that ubiquitous computing has imposed on human kind, and what it means to be a human in the age of machine intelligence. He explores how the perception and experience of time and space are radically changing now that machines dominate our everyday lives. His site-specific audio-visual performances have been presented internationally at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles US; International Digital Arts Biennial, Montreal, CA; and Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria.
The new work will be previewed at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, West Sussex, when the marque will bring together 250 art aficionados and philanthropists for an evening of exclusive art, automotive and culinary experiences. The event, named ‘Dine on the Line,’ will be hosted on the Goodwood production line at Rolls-Royce’s award winning manufactory, designed by the architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. 2019’s event will be in support of the Evelina London Children’s Hospital ‘Art for Allergy’ Appeal.
The Rolls-Royce Art Programme has supported a number of high-profile artists in recent years, including Tomás Saraceno, Isaac Julien, Asad Raza, Angela Bulloch and Yang Fudong. Details of the new direction for the Rolls-Royce Art Programme will be unveiled in October 2019